A helping hand and a listening heart

Every woman on World Pulse in this most amazing global family is unique and special from wherever she is coming because she has certainly travelled a distance from living her own reality to being here to share it with other women. Sometimes she is making another woman sitting in another corner of the globe believe her problems are not hers alone and there are many who are experiencing similar challenges, and in that validating their feelings and giving them hope. Other times she is sharing her journey from a particularly difficult situation to a favourable one and giving advice on how to overcome road blocks.

A World Pulse woman is a travel guide in short- she knows the journey and she knows how to get to her destination but the only thing that makes her different from others is, she feels the sense of responsibility to take other women along with her. A woman on World Pulse, no matter what her profession may be, is not content with just living her life till she contributes meaningfully to influence the lives of other women positively.

This is my perspective of the World Pulse spirit based on having been a community member over a decade and knowing, interacting and seeing thousands of women on www.worldpulse.com, having met few of them in person, being close friends with a handful and working with few others over the years. On the basis of my understanding of the World Pulse spirit I shall be making a befitting recommendation.

An exemplary soul hailing from Spain, Jill Langhus-Griffin, a fashion designer and social enterpreneur by profession deserves mention when I discuss the World Pulse spirit. I hope my vocabulary does justice to describe Jill's personality, most of all I hope I can remember all the accounts of her sensitivity, kindness, humanity, generosity, help, follow up to check on my (and others' in the World Pulse family) welfare, clarifications, discussions and expressions of solidarity. Jill's most remarkable qualities are helpfulness, resourcefulness, love and care that she embodies effortlessly. I have watched her for so many years and in this she is unchanging. Her love and concern to identify the needs of World Pulse women, scan the opportunities available and link us to jobs, paid assignments, workshops and learning opportunities and funding for our projects is worthy of praise, appreciation and recognition. We still haven't documented what these opportunities Jill got for these women helped them achieve.

We are all well acquainted with a self centred world where other than our families we are on our own in the struggle to succeed in our ambitions and goals. A helping hand and a listening heart in such an uncertain and challenging times as imposed on us by the pandemic, is what I have found in Jill. I am sure there are many women who have their own story about Jill and what she means to them but this is mine. If women begin to help other women like Jill, we will not need any external intervention or someone to think about solving women's problems because the resource is already within us only we are not using it enough. I also come from a culture where our media and society at large loves to pit one woman against the other and project that women are each other's worst enemies and part of the problem and I am convinced that even that narrative has its roots in patriarchy. Knowing Jill has also been a relief to me as that lie has been unfurled and I know that women are each other's saviours.

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For any queries related to this post I can be reached at urmila.chanam@gmail.com